The Truth About Tapering, Part IV

I had a nice swim yesterday--just got in and swam 2200 meters straight (close enough to 1/2 IM distance, right?) with the pull buoy. I could tell I've really been giving it to my arms lately. As usual, I swam in the gutter lane, where the jets of incoming water are shooting in at a pretty high speed. They toss me around a bit, so I know I'm not swimming as fast as I might be able to, but that's OK. The water was nice and cool.

When I finished, I had to tell myself that I was done and didn't need to do more. On such a lovely day, I can imagine just hanging out at the pool for an entire day. Someday I need to do that--swim like 2,000, lay around, swim another 1,000, lay around--you get the idea. I did manage to stretch for a few minutes in the pool.

Riding home, as always, felt harder than the ride there, even though I hadn't used my legs to swim at all. When I got home, I finished up the bike bottle of Gatorade and poured myself my post-swim cup of coffee. I also noticed I was very hungry, meaning my evil plan to deprive myself of carbs was working. So I ate a 1/2 pint or whatever size it is of raspberries and 1/2 pint of blueberries, and within an hour I was still starving so I made myself an egg salad sandwich. This, mind you, is all before 9:30AM!

I did a bunch of work and something came up that put me on delay for my brick workout. In the meantime, I was feeling plenty tired and decided I needed to violate my no mid-day caffeine taper policy, so I drank a can of Coke and ate one of those Gu Roctane things. The Gu tasted pretty good (blueberry pomegranate flavor), but I didn't notice anything special about how it felt. I also know now that I will want Ultra Violence in my Fuel Belt for the IMLP marathon and not Coke, although I'm going to start defizzing a liter of each tonight (professional defizzing, you know!).

And then I saw clouds rolling in, checked the radar, and WTF it looked like it was going to rain! Usually a threat of rain gets me to giddy up, but even though I put on the aero helmet and was pretty much naked on Ultra Bitch, I decided it best to hold down the intensity yesterday. With the extra pool riding I've been doing plus the extra yards because I'm doing meters (trust me, in my case it adds up!), I realized I'm doing a bit more than I need to be doing and need to get my legs rested. So in addition to riding easy, I also cut the ride short by about :15. When I got home, I got ready to run, and my legs still felt iffy, so I decided I didn't need to run for :30, but anyway the clouds were really building, so I just started running around the block (my block is pretty big), and adding on all while watching the clouds. Of course, it was impossible to avoid hills, so I turned onto one of the steepest closest to home, I'm running up it mumbling, "Fuck, fuck, fuck," but it's OK.

I managed an even :15 of running, and just as I approached my house, it started sprinkling, and my neighbor directly across the street had just arrived back in his car, and he says to me, "You made it just in time, kiddo!" You know that just made me smile hugely, because I'm thinking here I'm 51 and someone is calling me kiddo! Anyway, literally as soon as I got in my house the sky opened up, and I was happy for it, because we needed the rain. Later on I got a haircut, and when I got home, I decided a salad was not going to cut it for dinner, so I did have some rice. Part of my heavy leg feeling is the carb deprivation so we'll see if I feel more normal today.

So when I add up yesterday it was still 2.6 hours of "work," and through Thursday, I'm up to 9.5 hours of training (lots of swimming). Today I'm going to swim 1/2 hour to 45 minutes, depending (I hope it quits raining), but I am not riding a bike to the pool. Later on I'm running 1:15 and that will be that for today, a good stretch, hopefully I'll see my friend Lila passing out painkiller (booze) after work, and then I'll really start my preparations for next week. My new Fuel Belt arrived yesterday (yeah), so I need to play around with that plus race belt plus streamers. The forecast calls for rain tomorrow, so maybe I won't do that 2-mile open water race, who knows? At this point it doesn't matter, but I'm sort of looking forward to that sprint on Sunday!